A Perfect Life (23 page)

Of course. College. Angel had forgotten this is part of the au pair deal in term time. Feeling guilty for not putting Gosha's needs on her list of priorities, she scrabbles in her handbag for her wallet.

‘Oh, I'm so sorry, you must have your money. I'm sure I've got some of it. Oh, ten pounds isn't good. Shall I draw you a map? I'll just see if I can find some more money somewhere.'

Angel dashes out of the room and up to Ruby's bedroom, ignoring the telephone as it rings yet again. Ruby always has money. A small pink wallet covered by a notebook on Ruby's dressing table bulges with cash.

‘Twenty-four pounds, thirty-seven!!!!' she reads on the last page of the book. Feeling sinful and like a baby snatcher, she takes the twenty pounds and writes on the next page, ‘Mummy owes you twenty pounds plus interest!!!!'

Getting through immigration at JFK always feels to Nick like a prize in itself, so to him every trip to New York begins with a bonus. He hadn't really meant to go this month, but the children going back to school coincided with a conference on global manufacturing, and Nick suddenly couldn't bear to be staying in the Travel Lodge, knowing his small son and daughter were going back to school as the products of a strife-torn family. Sliding into the comforting squashiness of a cab and sinking back so all he can really see is the roof, and the coil of greasy black hair his Sikh driver has pinned up under what Nick always thinks looks like a small, crocheted beer mat, he shudders, part exhaustion, part recollection of the night before. There he was, in the Travel Lodge, lying on the neatly made brown bed, channel-hopping and drinking cup after cup of bitter, nausea-inducing coffee from the endlessly dripping filter machine. The football highlights were over, and reality TV had hit all channels
like a virus. Even Nick, whose capacity for avoidance was bottomless, could not watch another simpering girl with pumped-up lips and a soppy mind expressing her entirely unoriginal feelings on spending three days tucked up in a house full of strangers. Ten minutes of feverish texting was the next attempt to get away from pain. Before he had even told himself he was going to get a plane to New York the next morning, he was asking Jem if he wanted any music brought back, and composing a balletic dance, avoiding truth, to tell Foss and Ruby he was going away on Angel's phone. There was no reason Angel shouldn't know he was going to New York; he just didn't feel like telling her himself.

Having sent these messages, Nick had the double sense of achievement of having created a new reality for himself and having something to do tomorrow. Content to go to bed once there was no gaping void ahead of him, Nick took two of the sleeping pills he had stashed from Angel's supply and lay down. He did not sleep.

So today he is in transit and fucked up, two of his most familiar states of being, positions from which he feels numb and therefore to some degree comfortable. There is so much to do, and the time lag means that he is safe now to do much of it without anyone from home calling him. His favourite thing about being in America is that he can lead so much of his life while everyone he is important to is asleep and so in some way, in Nick's mind, does not know and therefore cannot be harmed by his antics.

He is here to buy the apartment. The cab stops in a snarl of traffic stretching from Queens right the way to the tunnel. He closes his eyes, remembering something from the end of
War and Peace
, when Tolstoy makes an argument for momentum deciding outcome, not generals, or battles, even. This applies to Nick and his new roots. Momentum is buying this apartment. And a mortgage with the Bank of America.

Booking his hotel room from the cab on the way into Manhattan, he feels spontaneous and free, and looking at his watch he realises he can make a seven-thirty NA meeting a few blocks away on the Lower East Side. Going to a meeting is the best way Nick knows of feeling he has arrived somewhere.

‘Grounding', as his last sponsor was keen on saying.

The community hall door is slightly ajar and the scraping of chairs leads Nick into the right room. He has been to this meeting before, and last time it was packed, but tonight there are not more than twelve people in the room. He sits down on a sofa next to a girl. She is sucking her thumb. It is difficult to look at her, because he is right up against her, but out of the corner of his eye Nick sees enough to make him uneasy. Her legs are folded in the lotus position, pale blue jeans so tight that they look like skin. Even though she is sitting very straight, her head does not come above the back of the sofa. She is miniature. Nick is sure she is a child. He glances around to locate her mother; it is unusual to bring kids of her age to meetings, though he has from time to time seen toddlers, hooked around their mothers' legs. Mothers
with babies at meetings always cry when sharing. It's a universal truth.

A woman opposite Nick sways from side to side, her arms clasped tight around a purple fluffy hot-water bottle in the shape of a hippopotamus, her legs black sticks, made thinner by the contrast at her ankle, where flesh disappears and her feet are engulfed in pastel-blue slippers decorated to look like racing cars. Nick wishes the meeting would start. A construction worker, still in work overalls, his dark skin pressed with plaster dust, sits down next to Nick, his hands restlessly turning a battered cigarette packet. Beyond him, the polished toe of a pair of handmade brogues taps the air, and the crossed legs of a Wall Street banker make a cage around his soft brown briefcase.

‘He was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel cake.' Nick's favourite Raymond Chandler line is always worth bringing out and trying in a new situation. It works well here. More or less everyone in the room is black and poor. The air smells of cinnamon coffee and hot bodies. The meeting is opened by a pumped-up black dude, gold chains heavy on his wrists, his fingers constantly pinching his nose as he sniffs, clears his throat and talks. Nick is prepared to bet the whole of Fourply on the fact that he is a former cocaine addict, and sure enough, the story comes out.

Nick sighs, listens, and relaxes for the first time in weeks. He had forgotten the great American godliness, never more pronounced than in a meeting, and
there is something utterly inclusive and soothing in the ritual mutterings of ‘Amen' and ‘Hallelujah' that accompany the familiar structure of the fellowship. Nick has a warm sense of being included and when he introduces himself he finds himself saying, ‘Hi, I'm Nick, and I am a former alcoholic and drug addict. Today I understood that my marriage is over, and I feel lonely and frightened. I am very grateful to be here tonight.'

‘Thanks, Nick,' choruses the group, and Nick feels his guard drop like a cloak with the sense that no one here hates him and everything might just be all right. He has a tentative feeling of hope, and glances at the faces of all these strangers who wish him well, just for being himself and being here. He realises he has been bracing himself against judgement for months, maybe even years. He rolls his shoulders, stretches and sits back, sighing a long breath of relief. How is it that he has stopped going to meetings? What got him here this evening? He decides to share. A woman finishes sharing her most recent relapse. ‘Thanks, Barbara,' says the chorus.

‘Hi, I'm Nick and I'm an alcoholic and drug addict,' he repeats, comforted by the familiar repetitive words of reintroducing himself.

‘Hi, Nick.'

Nick finds it is always the same when he shares in meetings. He resists, almost plunges, resists, and then as soon as he jumps in, he is swimming and the muddle that he thought was in his head becomes something he wants to say.

‘I just arrived here from London tonight and I am tired, but I'm glad to be here,' he begins. ‘And being somewhere new, and in the familiar structure of this fellowship, is helping me see where to go. The changes in my life may look like personal catastrophe from the outside, and I have wondered if relocating to New York as I plan to do is just another escape, like drink was, like drugs were, like sex is, but it is more than that.' He looks around the room. No one seems disgusted; he catches the eyes of the woman with slippers, she looks back at him kindly, steadily.

He goes on, ‘It is never too late to get the point of your own life. I'm not confident that I have grasped it yet, but at least I can see it. And that's a start.'

He finishes before his time is up.

‘Thanks, Nick,' chimes the group and the collective voice is supportive.

The construction worker follows. ‘Thanks, Nick. Hi, I'm Mo and I'm a recovering drug addict and alcoholic.'

‘Hi, Mo,' say Nick and the rest of the meeting. Nick feels safe and grateful and accepted. He falls asleep. No one minds.

Six the next morning and Nick is in the gym, rather to his own surprise. CNN news scatters images of war-ravaged Middle Eastern cities and weather-torn tropical islands and Nick pedals obediently up and down imaginary hills, exhaustion forming small crystals in his muscles. He will move to New York after Christmas. Life will begin again. Like it always does.

Lying on his back pushing absurdly heavy dumbbells up into the air a few moments later, he changes his mind. Foss and Ruby. Foss and Ruby. Jem. Jem, Foss and Ruby. His children. Angel. His wife. Well, ex-wife now, but not someone he can just forget. Indeed, he has experienced several moments of hope that now they are splitting up they might communicate better. It could happen. Nothing is so bad it can't be made a little better.

The girl with the thumb in her mouth shared at the meeting last night after Mo, and Nick cried for her innocence and prayed she could find it again. She was a child. She was eighteen. She had the most startling rasping voice and her face behind the curtain of hair was blank and stunned. There was nothing Nick had not heard a thousand times before in her story of trashed mother, absent father, abuse from stepfather and then on the streets with a pimp and a heavy crack addiction. But this time he heard her and he thought of his own children, and he thought of the choices he had made in life to have come to this point with his children fast asleep in their house in rural England and himself sitting next to another terrified child, hearing her choosing to face the world with nothing rather than continue on the grim path her life has been.

His children, like all children, deserved better. He had no idea of how to give it to them, but he wanted to try.

The only reason I am going home this weekend is that Coral is having a party before she goes to university and I want to go to it. She called me instead of just texting me at school because she was so surprised that Mum let her.

‘Hey, Jem, what are you up to?'

‘Nothing, of course, it's so boring here.'

‘Mum says I can have a party. She reckons I have had a hard time too and I deserve it.'

‘Great.' Mum is really bugging me and I wish she wasn't going to be there. But Melons will be, so it's worth putting up with Mum asking too many questions. She can't help it, I know she's worried, but she set this thing up and she can't expect everyone to just carry on like life is normal. Thinking about going home is weird. Dad doesn't live there any more. He doesn't seem to live anywhere. When I asked him where he was living he said, ‘Good question,' which is not much of an answer. So he's gone. I don't really
live there now because I am in a cell at school most nights, though I can come back at weekends, and Coral is about to not live there because she will be in Sheffield at university. That leaves Mum and the midgets. They hardly count as life forms, and I bet Mum decides to get rid of Sky TV. If she's got rid of Dad that will definitely be the next thing to go. She hates it and she hates all the cartoons Foss and Ruby watch. Mum keeps sending me stupid texts. The worst so far is: ‘I am in the woods, thinking about you playing rugby. Just caught a gold leaf, so am sending it to you with a kiss.'

I mean, what is that all about? How am I supposed to reply to that? Coral says she's doing too much meditation and that sort of hippy shit.

‘I think she wants to find herself,' Coral says, giggling, when we speak a couple of days before I come home for the party.

‘She's a bit old, isn't she?' I am in my study talking, and there is condensation on the window panes so the nights must be getting colder.

Coral puts on a stupid voice. ‘Oh no. You're never too old. D'you want to speak to Mel? She's found herself already.'

There is a lot of giggling. I reckon they have been at the vodka or whatever Coral has bought for the party.

‘Hi, Mel.'

‘Hey. Looking forward to seeing you at the weekend.' The funny thing about Mel is she has a tiny voice. Big tits though.

‘Yeah, me too.'

Mum is at the station to meet me when I get off the train. Jake has brought her in his red TVR. And of course the top is down and he is listening to Genesis. Great. How can Mum have such a geek friend? I can't even go into whether he might be her boyfriend, it is beyond rank. So I am supposed to sit in the back of a spivvy sports car while Mum yaks away about what an exciting weekend we are going to have. I don't see why she should get away with it.

‘Where's Dad?'

She more or less deflates in front of my eyes; if it wasn't so shocking, it would be funny.

‘He's staying at one of Jenny and Steve's holiday cottages. He says it is like living in an aquarium because it is in that courtyard village thing they built, but he can stay there for the winter and it's quite cosy. I'm sure he'll want to show you it.'

‘I might go and stay with him this weekend.'

That knocks the final air out of her. ‘Oh, OK,' she says.

Jake has been on his mobile phone all the time since I got in the car. Now he turns round to greet me.

‘Hi, Jem, how's it going?' Mum had always said we mustn't make judgements about people because of their clothes, but how can anyone wear a custard-yellow polo shirt with long sleeves? If he is Mum's boyfriend all I can say is she is making a big mistake. And how embarrassing is it for us? He is nearer my age than hers by miles.